Infosys Prize
The Infosys Prize is an annual award granted to scientists, researchers, engineers and social scientists of Indian origin by the Infosys Science Foundation and ranks among the highest monetary awards for research in India. The prize for each category includes a gold medallion, a citation certificate, and prize money of US$100,000. The prize purse is tax free for winners living in India. The winners are selected by the jury of their respective categories, headed by the jury chairs.
In 2008, the prize was jointly awarded by the Infosys Science Foundation and National Institute of Advanced Studies for mathematics. The following year, three additional categories were added: Life Sciences, Mathematical Sciences, Physical Sciences and Social Sciences. In 2010, Engineering and Computer Science was added as a category. In 2012, a sixth category, Humanities, was added.
Laureates in Engineering and Computer Science
The Infosys Prize in Engineering and Computer Science has been awarded annually since 2010.| Year | Laureate | Institution | Citation |
| 2010 | Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur | Awarded "in recognition of his fundamental contributions to the fields of surfaces and interfaces, adhesion, pattern formation, nanocomposites, materials science, and hydrodynamics, which have practical applications in such areas as energy storage, filtration, micro-electro-mechanical systems and optoelectronics." | |
| 2011 | Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur | Awarded "for his work in the fields of evolutionary multi-objective optimization and genetic algorithms." | |
| 2012 | National Chemical Laboratory | Awarded "for his incisive contributions in molecular tailoring of stimuli responsive smart polymeric gels; exploring the anomalous behavior of rheologically complex fluids, and for building the bridge between macromolecular dynamics and polymer processing." | |
| 2013 | Indian Institute of Technology Bombay | Awarded "for his wide-ranging contributions to nanoscale electronics, for integrating chemistry with mechanics and electronics to invent new functional devices, and for innovation and entrepreneurship in creating technologies and products of societal value." | |
| 2014 | Indian Institute of Science | Awarded "for being a pioneer in the design and optimization of database engines that form the core of modern enterprise information systems. His many contributions have found direct use in various types of databases including decision‑support, biological and multilingual databases, as well as produced software tools for query optimization and metadata processing." | |
| 2015 | Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research | Awarded "for his innovative use of first- principles theories and modeling in insightful investigations of microscopic mechanisms responsible for specific properties of specific materials such as topological insulators, ferroelectrics, multiferroics and 2-dimensional materials like graphene." | |
| 2016 | Indian Institute of Science | Awarded "for his seminal work in complex fluids and complex flows and especially in transition and turbulence in soft-walled tubes and channels." | |
| 2017 | Indian Statistical Institute | Awarded "for her scholarly record in algorithmic optimization and for its significant impact on biological data analysis. Her discoveries include a genetic marker for breast cancer, determination of co-occurrence of HIV and cancers and the role of white matter in Alzheimer's disease." | |
| 2018 | Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore | Awarded "for his work on the design of novel biosensors based on his research in biochemistry and gaseous sensors that push the performance limits of existing metal-oxide sensors. The prize recognizes his efforts to build a state-of-the-art infrastructure for research and talent training in nanoscale systems and for developing technologies for space and national security applications." | |
| 2019 | Sunita Sarawagi | Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay | Awarded "for her research in databases, data mining, machine learning and natural language processing, and for important applications of these research techniques." |
| 2020 | Hari Balakrishnan | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | Awarded "for his broad contributions to computer networking, his seminal work on mobile and wireless systems." |
| 2021 | Chandrasekhar Nair | Molbio Diagnostics | Awarded for "his development and large-scale commercialization of Truenat, a new point-of-care testing platform for PCR-based medical diagnostics. Dr. Nair’s work has enabled testing for millions of COVID-19 cases across resource-limited settings in India and the diagnosis of multiple infectious diseases including tuberculosis all over the world." |
| 2022 | Suman Chakraborty | Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur | Awarded for "his pioneering work in elucidating the interaction of fluid mechanics, interfacial phenomena, and electromechanics at the micro- and nanoscale. Using this understanding he has helped to advance healthcare in resource-limited settings through the invention of novel low-cost medical devices for sensing, diagnostics and therapeutics." |
| 2023 | Sachchida Nand Tripathi | Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur | Awarded "for the deployment of large-scale sensor-based air quality network and mobile laboratory for hyper local measurements of pollution, data generation and analysis using AI+ML for effective air quality management and citizen awareness, and for the discovery of new pathways of aerosols formation and growth that provide mechanistic understanding of haze formation." |
| 2024 | Shyam Gollakota | University of Washington | Awarded "for his impactful research and technology translation spanning multiple engineering domains in societally relevant areas such as smart-phone based affordable healthcare tools for low- and middle-income countries, battery-free computing and communication, and augmentation of human auditory sensing with artificial intelligence." |
| 2025 | Sushant Sachdeva | University of Toronto | Awarded "for his deep insights into mathematical optimization and the resolution of longstanding open questions in algorithmic theory that has established new standards on achievable performance in computational problems affecting information flows across societal lifelines, including the internet, transportation, and communication networks. He is a pioneer in theoretical computer science whose fundamental contributions have profoundly impacted many algorithmic challenges underlying modern society." |
Laureates in Humanities
The Infosys Prize in Humanities has been awarded annually since 2012.| Year | Laureate | Institution | Citation |
| 2012 | University of California, Los Angeles | Awarded "for his path-breaking contribution to history. He is an outstanding scholar of early-modern South Asian history. He has been able to develop a new genre of 'connected history,’ involving persons, products, and social and political processes stretching from Melaka in the East to Portugal in the West." | |
| 2012 | University of East Anglia | Awarded "for his imaginative and illuminating writings in literary criticism, which reflect a complex literary sensibility, and great theoretical mastery, along with a probing sense of detail. The Infosys Prize recognizes and celebrates the intellectual reach and the quiet humanity in his extraordinary writings." | |
| 2013 | University of Delhi | Awarded "for her outstanding contribution towards the integration of archaeological knowledge with the historical understanding of India from the earliest times. She is an exceptional scholar of proto-historic and early India. Her wide-ranging work on the past and present illuminates many aspects that include contemporary Indian society." | |
| 2013 | Jawaharlal Nehru University | Awarded "for her exceptional contribution to the field of theoretical linguistics. Her research on syntactic relations in Hindi-Urdu has related wider debates in linguistics to the study of Indian languages and has extended our understanding of India's linguistic diversity." | |
| 2014 | Increasing Diversity by Increasing Access and SpicyIP | Awarded "for his outstanding contributions to a broad range of legal issues and legal education. He has been doing this with remarkable fair‑mindedness in assessing opposing positions taken on quintessentially controversial areas, such as intellectual property laws." | |
| 2015 | New York University | Awarded "for his outstanding scholarship and originality in interpreting and scrutinizing analytical Indian Philosophy. He has thrown light on the shared ground as well as the dichotomy between Indian and Greek traditions of philosophical reasoning, thereby illuminating both." | |
| 2016 | Harvard University | Awarded "for his outstanding contributions to the history of migration, environmental history, and the history of international public health, and in recognition of his field-changing research on the interrelated past of contemporary Asia." | |
| 2017 | King's College London | Awarded "for her highly original explorations of the long-standing historical elements - conceptual, social and cultural - in colonial modernity, and for her subtle and insightful ethnography of cultural and political life in Kashmir." | |
| 2018 | Jawaharlal Nehru University | Awarded "for her extraordinarily illuminating study of Mughal, Rajput and Deccan art, as well as her insightful writing on the historical function and role of museums and their significance in the increasingly fraught and conflicted social world in which visual culture exists today." | |
| 2019 | Manu Devadevan | Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi | Awarded "for his highly original and wide-ranging work on pre-modern South India." |
| 2020 | Prachi Deshpande | Center for Studies in Social Sciences | Awarded "for her extraordinarily nuanced and highly sophisticated treatment of South Asian historiography." |
| 2021 | Ângela Barreto Xavier | University of Lisbon, Portugal | Awarded for "her deeply researched and sophisticated analysis of conversion and violence in the Portuguese empire in India, especially Goa.Her extensive body of writings in both English and Portuguese have shown Xavier to be an important and original voice on colonial and imperial history." |
| 2022 | National Law School of India University | Awarded for "his insightful understanding of the Indian Constitution, especially his carefully argued account of the importance of the landmark ‘basic structure doctrine’ adopted by the Supreme Court in 1973 that guides and constrains various efforts to amend it, while also ensuring its stability in the face of executive and legislative outcomes in India’s political life. | |
| 2023 | Science Gallery Bengaluru | Awarded for "her brilliant and granular insights into the individual, institutional, and material histories of scientific research in modern India. | |
| 2024 | Mahmood Kooria | University of Edinburgh, UK | Awarded for "his truly outstanding and seminal contributions to the study of maritime Islam in a global perspective...". |
| 2025 | Andrew Ollett | University of Chicago | Ollett is the world’s foremost scholar of the Prakrit languages in this generation. His book, Language of the Snakes, is a magisterial analysis of the cultural roles of Prakrit in tandem with Sanskrit and the Indian vernaculars over the last two thousand years. Andrew Ollett’s linguistic mastery and knowledge is breathtaking, ranging from detailed contributions to the study of Sanskrit, Prakrit, Kannada, Tamil, Old Javanese, and Chinese, in addition to his knowledge of the modern European languages and his training in Greek and Latin. |